Dear friends and readers! After the nice comments that followed the new presentation of my blog in the latest post, I am doing it again this week. So please, let me know if you like to read what follows with alternating French and English paragraphs.

I don’t know if you have ever taken the time to appreciate the beauty of some words, regardless of the language they represent. Well, in the course of my lessons, I sometimes stumble across words that make me think: ‘Hang on a minute. That’s actually a pretty word!’ Some of those simply because they ‘sound’ right and beautiful, others because they sound almost exactly like what they are and look like. So I thought that over the next few weeks, I would give you my top five in three categories, starting with the least obvious: verbs. Here goes.

éclore [eklɔʁ]: to come out of one’s shell, to open up, to flower, to blossom. I love the softness of this verb, where event the r becomes so soft to greet the new life coming out of the egg, or the flower that has just blossomed.

s’assoupir [sasupiʁ]: to go to sleep softly, to become calmer. Another verb, which for me is almost an onomatopeia, so soft the sound it produces, calm and without a care in the world, like a baby going to sleep.